All the Random Thoughts

The article, of course, does not focus on accounts that are explicitly couple accounts. It speaks on how there is a general decrease in women posting about any partner that might or might not be new, and even when posting, the increase in what can be perceived as privacy concerns. The pictures with the emojis over the partner’s face, the videos where the partner is out of frame and only their voice can be heard, and the angle work used so that only a quarter of their partner’s face is in the shot, if any at all.

As a social media user in 2026, I understand the privacy concerns, of course. Just because you as an adult woman have made a career out of putting yourself out into the vast world that is the internet, does not mean your closest friends and family should as well, and this includes the person you’re madly in love with, and who, hopefully, is madly in love with you too.

With the observed decrease in couples’ content, Joseph investigated and sited several potential reasons for the shift, some of which include:

People were tired of consuming content where women did not seem to have lives outside of the man they were involved with;

Some women are superstitious. The evil eye can do wonders for breaking up a relationship before you even realise what hit you;

Some women genuinely do not trust their men not to do or say something to embarrass them, even if they have been together for years.

The third reason, I think, is the one that people took and ran with, especially those that only saw the headline, and did not, in fact, read the full piece. And for a lot of them, they had some pretty excellent points to make.

We’ve all seen the videos of women coming on the internet to the defence of their men after they had posted a video in which their partner had committed a serios crime against their relationship and the comment section, rightly, called him out on it.

I’m talking putting dog food in your wife’s work lunch; I’m talking making a complete mockery of your wedding vows, I’m talking pranks like smashing a bride’s face into the wedding cake after being specifically asked not to, or dropping her in a pool in her full wedding regalia, and I’m talking describing your partner as ‘some bitch’ when asked how you would describe your fiancée.

It was painful to watch, and, as most people were quick to comment, absolutely embarrassing that you as a woman:

Accepted this treatment and stayed;

Thought it was charming enough to post on the internet; and,

Came to your man’s defence when the internet was outraged (on your behalf, mind you).

All of these things are embarrassing. Imagine having to come on the internet and insist with your audience that your husband putting dog food in with your work lunch ‘was just the way the two of you joke together’ and ‘he didn’t mean it that way.’

It’s absolutely and utterly humiliating.

And in our desperate attempt to make sure that everyone knew we were women who have ‘successfully decentred men’ in our lives (a notion that, in my humble opinion, is an impossible paradox when we live in the patriarchal society that we do), we have swung so far in the other direction it’s almost like nuance is not, nor has it ever been, in the room with us.

Now, not only is it embarrassing to go around posting your male partner, it’s also almost just as embarrassing to admit to liking couples’ content on social media.

We have ‘decentred men’, and in the process made it so that any genuine affection shown falls into the category of cringe or irony.

Women have entire platforms now talking about how to manipulate the affections and love out of a man (if that is what you even want of course), and how to always remain less invested, less vulnerable, and less committed so that you can walk away first with no heartbreak.

In the famous words of Off Campus character Garrett Graham, “Stop acting like a fangirl, and start thinking like a f**k boy.”

Except, that’s bad advice.

And it’s proven to be bad advice when Hannah, to whom the advice was given, chooses an emotionally profound relationship with Garrett himself over the shallow connection she had made with Justin, even though up until that point she had wanted Justin so badly that she was willing to follow Garrett’s convoluted plans to get him.

And the only reason she was able to build that emotional connection was because they were both nothing but committed to each other: committed to helping each other, supporting each other, being there for each other, and, eventually, being a good friend for each other.

There was no ‘one foot out the door to lessen heartache’ with them, because people don’t do that with friends. In fact, it is widely considered as an absolutely unhinged thing to do in friendship.

There is no way to build any sort of real connection when all you are thinking about the entire time is not being embarrassed, because being embarrassed is an essential part of being vulnerable, which is essential to building the type of love we’re all too embarrassed to admit to wanting.

So, yes, in that regard, having a boyfriend is always embarrassing.

I’m not even talking about the dramatic cancer reveal that had everyone in emotional shambles or the fact that Conrad knew all along and that was supposed to excuse his hot-and-cold behaviour all summer.

I’m talking about the kiss.

With Conrad.

Again, excuse me???

Belly made sure just an episode before that Jeremiah knew that he was it for her. That she was choosing him (more on those words later).

Only for her to be kissing his brother the first chance she got.

And then season two opens up with the vibe from every character in the show that Jeremiah is being completely and utterly unreasonable for being upset by this, even months later.

Now here’s the thing, I am a not, nor have I ever been, a Jeremiah fan. He’s immature and irresponsible, and while these qualities can be excuse when they’re all teenagers, it gets really annoying to watch in season 3 when Jeremiah and Belly are trying to convince everyone around them that they are very ready for marriage, with or without daddy’s money, in Jeremiah’s case (seriously, he gives her such a tiny ring you cant even see it in most scenes).

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Season two follows the trio as we see flashback of Belly’s relationship with Conrad evolving then promptly imploding as the pressure of his mother’s illness builds up to her death. Picking a fight with your grieving ex at his mother’s funeral? Unhinged behaviour on Belly’s part. We’re all grieving here, I understand, but girly it was his mother. This is not the time or place to be picking a fight about your relationship.

As season two progresses, we see Belly and Jeremiah reconcile in the present timeline as they bond over what an idiot Conrad is being. Nothing brings two people closer than the shared idea that the person they have been cursed to love is an absolute and utter self-sacrificing moron.

I’m not even going to touch on the ‘our summer house is getting sold woe is me life is so unfair’. That is a non-problem, by every account, especially considering that the house doesn’t even get sold in the end. It’s giving rich people problems.

What I will touch on is absolute dumpster fire that is Belly trying to convince Jeremiah that she made a mistake last year, and that he is, in fact, the love of her life. She is choosing him (again with those words), if he will have her.

Not to worry, she has a moment (which is really putting it lightly considering she had already ‘chosen’ Jeremiah by this point), when she genuinely considers going back to Conrad when he says that it has always been her. But then Conrad does what Conrad is known for (being a jerk to push people away) and Belly and Jeremiah ends the season together.

Yay!

For the sake of plot now, we’re going to be talking specifically about the 1995 remake of the movie. While the original was great, I think we should at least give this whole thing a fighting chance by comparing it to a source material that was originally released in colour.

For those of you out of the loop, Sabrina was a movie that followed our main protagonist (anyone wants to guess what her name was?) as she came into herself, left her old childish love behind, and opened up her heart to a more mature type of love.

The catch? Her ‘old childish love’ was the little brother of her ‘new mature love’.

When we are first introduced to Sabrina, she’s up in a tree watching an extravagant party from afar, clearly wishing she could be there dancing with David, the younger brother of the family her father works as a chauffeur for. David, to the surprise of no one in the audience, seems to barely even know who Sabrina is, too busy romancing and seducing his way through all the ‘more beautiful’ women of his class.

Tragic.

Sabrina is then informed by her father that she has gotten the opportunity to travel to Paris on a scholarship. And she goes. Obviously.

In Paris, Sabrina slowly but surely comes into herself. We see her dressing more stylishly, making friends, and even exploring a relationship with a charming co-worker. This all happens as she continues to pine for David, represented by the fact that she has a picture of him up that never seems to get covered even as the rest of the space is.

Sounds familiar?

Sabrina returns home stylishly dressed and ready to take on the world. As coincidence would have it, she runs into David as she’s looking for a cab to take her home, and he offers to drive her instead.

At this point, you might be thinking: ‘that’s so gentlemanly of him.’

You would be wrong, for two main reasons:

David is very much engaged to a very wonderful woman whom he clearly does not deserve; and,

David has no idea who she is. Like he completely does not recognize her. At all.

So here David is trying to get her name as he’s driving her to her home, which he does not know is also her home, and here she is being all coy and flirty. The 90s, am I right?

Up until this point, we know nothing about the older brother, Linus, but as Sabrina gets out of the car, she is immediately greeted, by name mind you, by Linus, sending David into a bit of a shock, to say the least.

But this does not dissuade David, no it does not, so he invites her to one of his family’s ultra-rich parties that his fiancée will unfortunately be missing where she wears one of her devastating Paris dresses as her father watches on in concern.

Linus is also concerned.

Very, very concerned.

Watching his brother pulling all the stops for a woman not his fiancée while his fiancée’s parents watch on in confusion is a headache for anyone, but especially for high-profile business tyrant Linus Larrabee who has a billion-dollar business deal riding on his little brother’s marriage to the daughter of his business merger partner.

Yikes.

So, Linus’s grand idea (never let it be said that men are intelligent creature in matters of the heart) is to orchestrate his brother’s injury to make room for himself to seduce Sabrina into falling in love with him instead.

Truly a fool proof plan, by all accounts.

And it works, except, of course, that he goes and falls in love with Sabrina himself (not a part of his plan, for those wondering).

He falls so much in love with her, in fact, that he tells her the truth, buys her a ticket to Paris, and sends David after her to make her happy. After all, if there was a choice, it was clear to Linus that she would always choose David, wouldn’t she?

This is when David decides to take a page out of his brother’s book and finally start behaving like a decent adult man. He tells his fiancée the truth (which she forgives him for, but we do not have time to discuss that because this was a movie from 1995 so we’re going to let some things slide) and orchestrates taking over the company from his brother so Linus could go after Sabrina himself.

And with the knowledge that Sabrina did not choose David after all and with David’s full blessing and support, Linus hightails it to Paris so he can meet Sabrina and they live happily ever after (what happens after the credits role is about as much my business as the back of my hair).

And so, Sabrina chooses Linus, and Belly chooses Conrad, and it’s all well and good.

Except to compare them is to do such a disservice to both stories that I’m genuinely unsure who decided on this. Sabrina was never with David, and she certainly never saw Linus as anything resembling an option until he essentially threw himself at her feet. She was not with David, then Linus, then David again, then Linus again. She did not choose one with complete confidence, then the other, then back to the first.

And she most certainly did not have a Suzannah Fisher telling her that she had always known she was meant for ‘one of my boys’ then dying before specifying which one.

As a side note here, I genuinely believe all the messy nonsense could have been avoided if Suzannah had minded her business in this regard. Her death was traumatic enough without adding to the weight on the shoulders of a sixteen-year-old that the woman you considered a second mother, a woman who knew you sometimes better than your own mother, though you were meant for one of her sons. No specificity on which one, just one of them.

No wonder Belly tried so hard to make it work come hell or high water.

And to have Conrad dismiss these concerns when brought up by Belly in the finale was also the wrong move, and that is a hill I will die on.

Sure, both Sabrina and Belly ended up with the older brother when initially the younger one was presented as the suitable candidate, but Belly had always, always known that it was Conrad for her. Anything she did outside of that was her trying to move on, trying to make healthier choices, and trying to choose herself in a relationship the way she never could with Conrad. Sure, it could be argued that the version of them that ended up together were more mature and settled, but her running crying to chase him down on his train tells me Belly will always be that little girl who will do anything to be with Conrad, even abandon the woman she had fought so hard to become on her own.

This is not even mentioning her wearing that ‘Suzannah’ dress in the final scene when we saw her style evolve into something more in Paris.

For context, I went to an all-girls Christian school in Jamaica. By the time I got to the eighth grade, my friends and I discovered the vast and wonderful world of Wattpad. The concept of a proper application where anyone can read and write books for completely free was new at the time (barring websites like Tumblr, fanfiction.net and AO3, there wasn’t really a proper app for just enjoying stories without either downloading them or needing an active internet connection). And back then, the app was completely free to use. You sign up and choose from the myriad of available options: No Payments, No Ads. Hell, when we were first using it, there wasn’t even a proper filter to search for only completed works. And so, it became a tradition for my friends and I to have weekly get togethers about the new chapter updates of whatever book had caught out fancy. It was a glorious.

By the time we got to the ninth grade, the school had even introduced a system that allowed students with tablets to bring them to school. Given that we were reading, the teachers were none the wiser about just what we were reading. What had started off as a couple of students on a random app became a generation wide phenomenon, and suddenly everyone was on Wattpad, reading, discussing, and a lot of the time, even writing. It was stories by teenagers for teenager, and for the most part, by girls for girls.

We devoured these mediocre, error-ridden, ‘English-is-not-my-first-language’ books like they were our last meals on earth. We could not get enough of them. It was like the doors to all knowledge had opened up in front of us, and we were given free reign. There was no genre we didn’t try, no storyline we were above experimenting with, and no taboo too taboo. By the time 2016 rolled around and we had been on it for a few years, we were even choosing our books based on how well written they were.

Just imagine it: a bunch of teenaged girls engaging critically with the narration choices that were being made by these authors. It wasn’t just about the plot and relationships and themes anymore; if the author didn’t know that you were supposed to skip a line when a new character spoke, we weren’t reading it. There was a difference between a grammar rule broken as a creative choice to achieve a certain tone, and a grammar rule broken with zero coherence.

And yes, it made us better readers, but it also made us better writers, and most importantly, it made us better thinkers.

We took the skill we had honed and started applying it to everything in our lives: the movies we watched, the shows we followed, the news on TV, and even the conversations we were a part of. No information given to us was taken at face value, and we started learning about what it means when information comes from a credible source and when random people on the internet where talking absolute foolishness but doing so with the confidence of a Nobel Prize Professor.

It was ingrained into us, and not to sound like a grumpy grandpa whose day is ruined if he doesn’t get to do the newspaper crossword, but kids these days just don’t engage in the same way. They don’t read, because they can’t read, and the nature of instant gratification content that they have been conditioned with means that anything they deem too hard they will not do. But that’s the thing about acquiring a new skill: you have to do the thing you don’t know how to do, the thing that you don’t have the skills for, to actually acquire the skill itself.

It is the paradox of learning: the only way to learn something is to do something you don’t know how to do.

The literacy rates are low and dropping further. These kids don’t even know how to read out the words, let alone perform any grade appropriate feats of reading comprehension. Every random person on the internet is speaking truth, and they wade through AI slop like the clearest Caribbean waters. None of that lends itself to building any real critical thinking skills, independent learning abilities, or even a nurturing of their curiosity.

The situation is dire, and as concerned as us teachers are, the parents don’t seem to care all that much. We live in an age of ultra-convenience, and that has reflected in the way we’re seeing parents parenting their child. They don’t seem to care if their child has homework or studying to do: the convenient thing is to give them a tablet and keep them busy. And then they come at the end of term to complain about their children’s grades. Sir, your child has not turned in a single assignment this whole term, and the essay they wrote in the final exam has me questioning if your child has ever read a book, let alone the one assigned.

They want the results with none of the effort, and we the teachers get all the blame.

I’m not even going to get into the use of AI to complete written assignments. That’s a whole other can of worms that deserves its own space.

We keep pushing all these new technologies, and then adapting the way we teach to suit them instead of adapting them to suit the real-life learning needs of our students.

Watching Off Campus was a rollercoster ride that I would gladly get on again.

What really caught my attention was the way that these hyper masculine boys living together seemed to have left their toxicity at the door (or most of it anyways).

They talk about consent and cook for the pleasure of it and find each other in compromising situations and don’t bat an eye about any possible homosexuality (I'm looking at you pink dildo).

And everywhere I look here are these women on the internet telling me that these men don't exist in real life. These are only men that exist in fiction because these are men ‘written by women'.

What does that even mean? I mean, I know what it mean in theory, but in practice, why is it so easy for us to imagine that these men can be written by women but not be raised by women? What is it about our current society that makes it almost impossible to imagine that a man could be raise the way a man could be written?

My theory: if the mothers are the authors of our lives, then fathers are the publishers.

If you talk to any fiction author, they will tell you themselves that their characters have a way of getting away from them. They start with these tame ideas and then these people take on lives on their own and you as the author are left with documenting what they are doing. You're not creating anything from thin air, you're just nurturing them into a story they are choosing for themselves.

It's a lot like mothering children, if you ask me.

And then that manuscript reaches a publisher and they need to make it ‘marketable’. It doesn't matter how unique or good it is if it can't be sold. The bottom line is that it has to perform well, and so they start butchering it and removing anything that might be ‘problematic’. They ‘toughen it up’ and ‘polish’ it and make it ‘palatable'. That's the idea anyways.

And by the end you might end up with a masterpiece, but it's certainly one that is very far from the initial truth if you choose a publisher you’re not aligned with.

That's a father. The bottom line for them: a legacy. They want to see their sons succeed, but they want that success to look conventional, and they want that success to come from someone they molded, to prove they did it right. That they themselves succeeded.

And this is completely fine when the writer and publisher are aligned on a vision and message and values. Where it goes off the rails is when you've got these two parents having children when they don't even agree on whether or not it's okay to sleep with the AC on.